Cumbee Tyndal

I remember when I first met Toni Tully in the mid-80s when I was working at the Birmingham Museum of Art and the Maralyn Wilson Gallery. After three years in Birmingham, I decided to pursue graduate studies in Art Criticism at the State University of New York in Stony Brook, Long Island. With an award from the Alabama State Council grant via Space One Eleven to curate and present a series of lectures in the gallery based upon my graduate work, Toni offered to let me stay over the summer in her downtown studio. It was then that I saw her easels, which were literally benches that ran the full course of the loft with gutters attached to their outer edge, devised to allow the large quantities of fluid created by Tully’s layers of painted glazes to drain off the easel. This process is also what produced Toni’s signature color transparencies. I am forever indebted to her sense of openness—in her approach to her work, in her method, and in her genuine support of artists throughout our community. Toni’s process-based approach is apparent in my current painting, pairing a geometric substructure with layers of poured paint and mineral spirits, allowing the paint to be itself in large passages. This chaos of splatter, the paint’s independence, is braced by the grid and by areas of controlled painting, realizing, as she did, the joy in the dialogue created by employing both methods.

Cumbee Tyndal graduated from the University of the South, Sewanee, with a B.A. in Art History. She worked as Assistant Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Birmingham Museum of Art where she was instrumental in the organization of two large scale traveling exhibitions: “The Expressionist Landscape”, and “Looking South: A Different Dixie”. In 1991, Ms. Tyndal earned an M.A. in Art History and Criticism from the State University of New York at Stony Brook where she studied under the notable critic Donald Kuspit. She then worked for Michael Werner Gallery and Pamela Auchincloss Gallery, both in New York City.